Public Please

The debate between David Hazinski and Leonard Witt about whether or not to regulate citizen journalism presents several good reasons to support each position, but ultimately neither argument addresses the basic reforms that must occur to handle citizen journalism.

In “Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky“, Hazinski argues that citizen journalism is “ripe for abuse” because journalism, unlike other professions, does not regulate itself with any “licensing, testing, mandatory education or boards of review.” Hazinski suggests that by imposing such standards, we will be able to prevent the spread of misinformation, such as “a faked Rodney King beating video [, which] appears on the air somewhere.”

In “CITIZEN JOURNALISTS: They don’t need to be regulated“, Witt argues that we do not need to regulate citizen journalism because “you can be a great journalist without formal training”. He cites statistics about how journalists without formal educations in journalism have won journalism awards. For example, he cites a survey by Betty Medsger, which shows that, within a 10 year time slice, “59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism.”

Witt then argues that citizen journalism grows out of the open-source software movement, and that this “open bazaar form of citizen-created journalism will produce a better informed public and a more rigorous public square” than the top-down, cathedral style approach that would emerge from regulating the profession of journalism. To address Hazinski’s concern of unregulated citizen journalists spreading misinformation, Witt argues that “models will be formed, just as they were in the open-source software movement, which will filter out the crackpots, vandals and incompetents and it will happen without a certification board.”

Witt’s final point is that the regulation of professional journalism will calcify existing bias for majority perspectives. Witt argues that such regulations would institutionalize what Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte calls “censorship by omission”, where as Witt describes, “the voices of the poor, the disenfranchised and minority groups often go unheard.”

I am largely persuaded by Witt’s arguments, even though they do not necessarily prevent the spread of misinformation by untrained citizen journalists. I think that we can establish principles of journalism, and that such principles if mandated would have a significant effect on the professional performance of journalists. Hazinski is correct to point out that we need journalists to practice their profession in an ethical and principled manner, and that if journalists fail to do so, our society suffers enormously - people do die from misinformation.

Although journalism is mission critical for our society, we should not deceive ourselves into thinking, as Hazinski suggests, that journalism requires the regulation that attends the practices of medicine or law. Unlike medicine or law, a mistake in the press, on the whole, can almost always be repaired by increased participation in the practice of journalism. This does not mean that increased participation in journalism alone accounts for such repair, but in theory, a mistaken story, unlike a mistaken surgery or legal judgement, cannot pronounce death at the instance it is uttered. The consequences of the press’ speech acts are, on the whole, not immediate, but take some time to develop, at least enough time for citizens en masse to investigate and repair the story.

Of course, this form of self-correcting, largely unregulated citizen journalism presupposes a web platform for near real-time and uncensored publication, and it presupposes a mechanism for filtering through this mess of reviews to find and revise a fallacious story. It assumes that the truth, in its revision, can evolve and bubble up into the public mind and that people will participate in this process. I think we can technologically design such a platform and that we can muster the collective will of the people to use it. Already we see the beginnings of a citizen journalism platform with the social bookmarking site Digg, a site which tries to let users democratically vote for any content on the web. We see the ideas of non-censorship and open publishing evolve and develop with sites like Indymedia and Wikipedia, which permit anonymous posting and archive all submissions for public review. And we see the moral impulse and commitment of citizen journalists like Wei Wenhua, who risked and received death in order to publish truth to power.

Admittedly, the technology of the citizen journalism platform imposes regulation. The program that runs the platform does regulate the status of journalists, but the institution it purports is largely divorced from the hierarchical rules which regulate life-or-death professions like doctors, lawyers, and soldiers. The professional regulations of the citizen journalism platform encode the status of journalist in a democratic manner, one which balances egalitarianism and elitism with the mantra of equal opportunity. The core concerns of such a platform in its polished form is the maximization of informed participation and the minimization of unnecessary suffering for every individual stakeholder, even those who do not participate.

If we could not devise a platform which self-corrects misinformed stories, and if those misinformed stories lead to the immediate and serious harm and suffering of people, then we would need to regulate the profession of journalism, like we regulate doctors. In the corporate media environment that we now inhabit, where the platform for citizen journalism is not truly democratic, but remains filtered by an elite cadre of editors, ones with a vested interest in the maintainence of their elite status, it is not suprising to discover that many stories published by the corporate media do lead to the immediate harm and suffering of people. We only need to think of the shock and awe stories leading into the invasion of Iraq, or the preposterous public posturing of the CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate, where elite editors selected unrepresentative questions from the public that made public participation look ridiculous. Of course, if we are to preserve this corporate media and maintain a semblence of journalistic ethics, we will need to regulate the profession as a life-or-death profession. But why regulate the profession by dictation when you can get rid of its dictators? We can still preserve the business of journalism without the hierarchical corporate mentality.

If we are to preserve the business of journalism, we must reconsider the function of professional journalism - not just in its journalistic values, but in the nature of its work. There needs to be a democratization of the profession itself. Journalists need to establish themselves as investigators - not dictators, as fellow jurors - not judicial officials, as co-authors - not celebrities. Journalists must accept the fact that they no longer have complete editorial control. They must now recognize that their work is to analyze and synthesize citizen journalism as citizen journalists. The new journalism recognizes that eveyone writes, everyone edits, and everyone prioritizes the news.

To realize this new journalism will require a reorganization of the business of journalism. The business of journalism must mirror the organization of the platform - and not the other way around. Journalists must adapt to the medium because the medium will not conform to old conventions. What once was a monolithic and homogeneous corporate media will eventually spread out into the long tail of a boutique business media. The platform will allow anyone to temporarily band together with anyone to get a piece of the pie. As my dad might say, “Little pigs will eat; hogs will go to slaughter.” Despite the fact that the corporate media, like bloated hogs, currently control the central communication channels, the tide will change as the digital medium is explored, and the media hogs will go to slaughter. This will be the driving economic force of citizen journalism, all driven by the possibilities of a public digital platform, where everyone can get paid piece-meal, as voluntary freelance groups, and in proportion to the popularity of their participation - whatever information processing that participation constitutes.

Is this populist vision for the business of journalism a pipe dream, conjured up with the hype of social media? I think its immanent potential is what strikes fear into the corporate media, and what gives hope to the people of the Internet.